Reaching out bring results for UNHCR in Malawi refugee camp

Malawi / UNHCR and partners conduct a zone visit in Dzaleka camp in Malawi. Through the zone visits, UNHCR and partners have been able to address individual refugee problems as well as obtain information on issues gaps that need to be addressed.

DZALEKA REFUGEE CAMP, Malawi, November 8 (UNHCR) – Askal Tilahun says there's nothing like direct and regular personal contact to help her find out what's going on in Dzaleka Refugee Camp and who needs help.

The UNHCR community services officer is a member of a multifunctional team that visits a different zone of the camp each week, chatting to the refugees, getting to know their concerns and challenges, catching up on the gossip and keeping an eye out for problems that need to be addressed quickly. The camp is divided into nine zones, each gathering a mix of nationalities and named after different parts of Malawi.

It's a simple approach that has had a quick and important impact since being launched in February, helping UNHCR to build greater trust, reach out further, identify people with special needs and act on this knowledge.

Before, the refugee agency would only meet people at the UNHCR office to discuss concerns. Every day there would be a few dozen people at these sessions, but many of those most in need of help never showed up. UNHCR also held meetings twice a year with refugee leaders on age, gender and diversity issues as well as focus group discussions on protection concerns.

"After we started these zone visits, we could understand more about what the key issues were, and their impact on the lives of individuals," said Gavin Lim, a UNHCR field officer. "For example, the zone visits have really highlighted the fuel and energy problems camp residents face, and while we have not resolved the problems, we were able to bring on board a consultant who will advise the office on what we can do differently in 2013."

The visits have also directly helped many individuals, such as 63-year-old Elizabeth Djuma, whose cases might have fallen through the cracks but for UNHCR staff hearing about their problems or seeing for themselves during their weekly camp walkabouts.

Djuma, a refugee from South Kivu province in Democratic Republic of the Congo, struggled to look after herself and the grandchildren in her care after badly injuring her leg while trying to fix the roof of her shelter. One of the multifunctional teams found out about her situation during a zone visit and arranged for her roof to be mended and for counselling for trauma.

The outreach programme also helped the Mbayas, another family from eastern Congo. The family patriarch, Boniface, was kidnapped during an attack on their village last year, which left his parents and a daughter dead. His pregnant wife Jeanine, thinking Boniface was dead, fled with her three surviving children, including a six-year-old boy living with disability. But the husband had survived his ordeal and eventually fled to Malawi, where he was reunited by chance in a transit centre with his overjoyed wife and children.

The family were brought to Dzaleka and assisted by UNHCR and its partners with shelter materials and other basic necessities. Their oldest boy went to school, but they hid the brain-damaged Bonfice in their home. They feared the community would consider them cursed if they saw the boy and the family would be stigmatized and discriminated against.

Their secret was only discovered when another UNHCR field officer, Kelvin Sentala, heard a child crying during one of the first zone visits. When UNHCR staff learned of the child and his disability, they were able to assist the family by providing a special chair and enrolling him in a daytime care programme offered by UNHCR's partner, the Jesuit Refugee Service. They were given extra soap and kerosene. Bonfice and his family are now doing much better.

An additional benefit of these zone visits is that they have helped reduce the number of people turning up to meet UNHCR staff at the office. "It seems like there is now a sense from the refugees that UNHCR is more present in the camp, even though we were there before," noted Lim. "People know we are available to them and that coming to the office is not the only way they can speak to UNHCR staff."

The field officer said the refugees also had a better understanding of how UNHCR can support them. "We are now trying to incorporate what we have learned from the zone visits into projects that can help better address the gaps, such as developing a new community centre to address the lack of youth activities and get young people more involved," explained Lim.

Malawi hosts more than 15,000 refugees and asylum-seekers, mostly from Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi. Nearly all reside in Dzaleka, located about 50 kilometres from the Malawi capital, Lilongwe.

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Health crisis in South Sudan

There are roughly 105,000 refugees in South Sudan's Maban County. Many are at serious health risk. UNHCR and its partners are working vigorously to prevent and contain the outbreak of malaria and several water-borne diseases.

Most of the refugees, especially children and the elderly, arrived at the camps in a weakened condition. The on-going rains tend to make things worse, as puddles become incubation areas for malaria-bearing mosquitoes. Moderately malnourished children and elderly can easily become severely malnourished if they catch so much as a cold.

The problems are hardest felt in Maban County's Yusuf Batil camp, where as many as 15 per cent of the children under 5 are severely malnourished.

UNHCR and its partners are doing everything possible to prevent and combat illness. In Yusuf Batil camp, 200 community health workers go from home to home looking educating refugees about basic hygene such as hand washing and identifying ill people as they go. Such nutritional foods as Plumpy'nut are being supplied to children who need them. A hospital dedicated to the treatment of cholera has been established. Mosquito nets have been distributed throughout the camps in order to prevent malaria.

Health crisis in South Sudan

The resilience and dignity of refugees in South Sudan

Since September 2011, more than 100,000 Sudanese refugees have fled bombing raids and fighting in their home country and taken refuge in South Sudan's Upper Nile state. Hosted in four refugee camps in Maban County, they face tough living conditions that have worsened during the rainy season. Staff from the UN refugee agency share some of their hardship in one of the most remote and difficult to access areas of South Sudan.

Grateful for the life-saving assistance they receive from the UN refugee agency and its humanitarian partners, the refugees are an example of the extraordinary resilience humans are capable of. The following photographs, taken by UNHCR staff, show the conditions in which they live during a daily battle to maintain their dignity and hope.

The resilience and dignity of refugees in South Sudan

A Family On the Move in South Sudan

When fighting erupted in Kormaganza, Blue Nile state, in September last year, 80-year-old Dawa Musa's family decided to flee to the neighbouring village of Mafot. Dawa was too frail to make the two-day journey by foot, so her son, Awad Kutuk Tungud, hid her in the bush for three days while he moved his wife, Alahia, and nine children to safety. Awad returned for his mother and carried her to Mafot, where the family remained in relative safety for several months - until artillery began shelling the village.

Awad again fled with his family - this time across the border to South Sudan. For 15 gruelling days, he carried both his elderly mother and his daughter Zainab on his back, until they reached the border crossing at Al Fudj in February. UNHCR transported the family to Jamam refugee camp in South Sudan's Upper Nile state. They lived in safety for seven months until heavy rains caused flooding, making it difficult for UNHCR to bring clean water to the camp and bringing the threat of highly contagious waterborne diseases.

UNHCR set up a new camp in Gendrassa, located 55 kilometres from Jamam and on higher ground, and began the relocation of 56,000 people to the new camp. Among them were Awad and his family. Awad carried his mother once again, but this time it was to their new tent in Gendrassa camp. Awad has plans to begin farming. "Come back in three months," he said, "and there will be maize growing."